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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Communists don't like competition, capitalists don't like competition either, what does that leave us with?

Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?

I'd argue that without competition, it isn't capitalism, and before someone "no true Scotsman"'s me, Adam Smith wrote about the dangers of monopolies in The Weath of Nations. Where Scotsman isn't a well defined term, and neither is capitalism, coloquially anyway, maybe, but a free market would have rival trade unions with different certification processes and employers would decide which certification was preferable.

"Neoliberalism" became a dirty word for lots of reasons (mainly because it caused a ton of people in developed nations to lose their jobs, as manufacturing capacity shifted to developing nations and developed nations leaned into the information economy), but there was a time when the word wasn't tainted and the pro-market Democrats of the Clinton era absolutely self-identified as Neoliberals.

They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.

pro-communists want a system without competition. Pro-capitalists do want competition or at least no restrictions. People who are practicing capitalists would love to not have competition.

Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.

Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.

Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.

I prefer 90% free 10% preventing monopolies, myself.

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